Beer coasters galore in the expo hall of the the Craft Brewers Conference and BrewExpo at the Colorado Convention Center (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

In an auditorium filled with thousands of brewers Wednesday, Paul Gatza told a story about visiting a beer festival this year.

He went out of his way to check out breweries he had never tried before, he said. Most had opened in the past two years.

Gatza, president director of the Brewers Association, the Boulder-based trade association for small and independent American craft brewers, said seven or eight of the 10 breweries needed improvement. The brewers didn’t think so, he said. They thought their beers were awesome.

“The truth is, they’re not – and we need to improve it,” Gatza said. He then offered a blunt assessment of the importance of maintaining quality in an industry that is growing crazy fast: “Don’t f*** it up.”

So emerged one of the more compelling themes at the onset of the 31st annual Craft Brewers Conference, which has drawn more than 7,000 brewing industry people to Denver this week. The conference began Tuesday and runs through Friday.

Gatza was taking cues from established brewers – BA members who have become increasingly vocal with concerns that some new start-up brewers lacking experience are creating inferior product and not investing sufficient resources into the testing and troubleshooting necessary to keep beer good and drinkers happy.

Thousands of brewers fill whatever the theater is now called at the Colorado Convention Center (Eric Gorski, The Denver Post).

Gatza said beer quality is at all an all-time high, especially at the top end of the industry. However, he said, “With so many brewery openings, the potential is there for things to start to degrade on the quality side, and we wouldn’t want that to color the willingness of the beer drinker to try new brands. If a beer drinker has a bad experience, they are just going to go back to companies they know and trust.”

If there was any doubt this was an issue weighing on brewers’ minds, Mitch Steele of Stone Brewing Co. laid that to rest, affirming Gatza’s comments while picking up an award for innovation in craft brewing.

“If you are starting a brewery,” Steele said, “please, for God’s sake, hire someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Craft brewing also experienced a boom period in the 1990s, when many new players entered the field not out of passion for hops and malt but out of a desire to make a buck. This latest wave is different. Many new breweries are being founded by homebrewers with no previous professional brewing background. The passion is there but the experience is not.

Veteran brewer John Harris said in an interview Wednesday that at a time when beer education classes are tough to get into, many homebrewers who have little to go on but the rave reviews of friends just open their doors and say, “Here we are.”

He said new breweries should spend as much money on their quality control program as the brewing equipment.

“If you are having problems with beer, ask others for help,” said Harris, who brewed at Deschutes Brewing and Full Sail Brewing and last fall opened Ecliptic Brewing in Portland. “Don’t be too proud. We can help each other make our beer better.”

At a news conference that followed the opening conference session, Gatza said quality problems include off flavors, oxidation and the presence of dimethyl sulfide, a sulfur compound produced during fermentation that gives an unpleasant whiff of corn. He said many new breweries are not sending beer to labs for testing as they should.

Bob Pease, the Brewers Association’s chief operating officer, emphasized the nonprofit trade group does develop materials for members on quality issue, many of which are low cost or free (including a best practices guide mailed to all BA members).

Former Future Brewing’s beer is brewed by a microbiologist and former homebrewer (provided by the brewery)

Former Future Brewing opened in Denver this year. The head brewer, James Howat, is a microbiologist whose previous brewing experience involved homebrewing for seven years. His wife and the brewery co-owner, Sarah Howat, said the brewery has every employee taste the beer on a daily basis and is doing testing in-house on a very small lab system.

Howat said Former Future has learned lessons. A beer it served in December at a festival before even opening, she said, had an off-flavor and “was not the best we brewed.”

Although established brewers say they stand ready to help on quality issues, it’s notable people are going public with concerns about homebrewer-led breweries.

Howat expressed disappointment in the tone of the recent criticism of new brewers.

“I think people have a perception that because you are new you are not going to be good, which is disheartening,” she said. “For James never having brewed on large-scale system, I think we are knocking out some pretty good beer.”

Gatza name-checked several newer breweries that are doing very well, including Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis, Surly Brewing in Minneapolis and Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, Florida, all of which have quickly gained national reputations for not just quality but innovation. Gatza said the Brewers Association board wants to keep barriers to entry into the brewing world low.

“This isn’t just a club where you got in early enough and you can reap the rewards and keep everyone else out,” Gatza said. “Some of the new brewers are going to have a lot to add.”

And there will be many new brewers. With more than 1,700 nearly 1,900 breweries in planning, according to the BA, it is not surprising the quality is a greater emphasis of the trade association.

Back to Gatza’s story about visiting that beer festival … During the news conference Wednesday, he noted that not every beer at that festival let him down. One brewer, he said, “knocked my socks off” with an imperial stout.

I asked Gatza afterward who brewed that beer, and he said it was Elevation Beer Co. of Poncha Springs.

Elevation Beer Co. says it takes quality very seriously (provided by the brewery).

Xandy Bustamante, one of the mountain brewery’s co-founders, was understandably happy to hear it. (The beer in question was Oil Man, an 11 percent alcohol by volume imperial stout aged in Breckenridge Distillery bourbon barrels).

Bustamante said the brewery benefited from experience and “taking our time.” The head brewer, Christian Koch, had a couple of years’ worth of production brewing experience on his resume working at Tommyknocker Brewing in Idaho Springs.

Elevation ships beer to an independent lab for testing now but is getting ready to install its own lab and hire a lab tech, he said. To get a sense of just how costly these things can get, Bustamante said one vendor at the Craft Brewers Conference expo hall was pitching a $40,000 testing machine. He said the brewery is more likely to spend $5,000 to $10,000 to test for yeast cell counts, cleanliness, diacetyl and gravity, basic stuff he admits “the guys at Coors would probably laugh about.”

“You have to put your money where your mouth is with quality,” Bustamante said. “We have dumped batches, which is hard to do with a new brewery when you are trying to pay your bills.”

Bustamante said Elevation also has sought out quality control advice from more established brewers including Avery Brewing in Boulder, Ska Brewing in Durango and Upslope Brewing in Boulder.

He considers the comments from Gatza and others about quality “a good warning for everybody. Everyone wants to help each other make great beer. It only takes one bad beer to take people off craft beer.”

Paul Gatza, president of the Brewers Association, “said beer quality is at all an all-time high, especially at the top end of the industry. However, he said, “With so many brewery openings, the potential is there for things to start to degrade on the quality side, and we wouldn’t want that to color the willingness of the beer drinker to try new brands. If a beer drinker has a bad experience, they are just going to go back to companies they know and trust.””

There’s another factor that might color the willingness of beer drinkers to try new brands. Over the last month or so I’ve tried around a dozen different IPAs, mostly from brewers along the Front Range. It was all good, but it was all more or less the same. Might as well slap a white label on the bottle and market it as generic IPA. If you’re going to get the same beer with different labels there’s little reason to try anything new. So yes, by all means, quality is important, but not at the expense of stifling innovation. Even a little “off” taste would sometimes be a welcome change!

I think I agree with your sentiment regarding same-ness in beers and especially among IPA’s. However, how much more can (or should for that matter) be done with and IPA? After so many hundreds of slightly different IPA’s to the over-the-top/shouldn’t just because you can IPA’s, there’s just not much more you can do. Does that make sense?

That said, I think with so many new breweries, the last thing that bothers me is sameness. That should drive ultimate keep costs to the consumer in check (supply and demand).

Back in the mid-90’s when microbreweries were just getting started it seems that there was a great deal more variety in IPAs (my favorite beers BTW). Some were “American-style” so heavily hopped they often tasted like they’d been strained through a bail of alfalfa, some more moderately hopped, and some quite lightly hopped. Likewise the malts ran from smoked crystal to lightly roasted giving flavors that ran from hoppy stout to hoppy lager and colors from almost black to light blond. Now, with a few stand-outs, they’re all moderately hopped and generally copper-colored, very middle-of-the-road IPAs, about as different as Budweiser, Coors, and Miller. Sure there are subtle differences, but not enough to go out of your way to try something new. So yeah, I go to the cooler, find the cheapest local IPA and buy a six, knowing that about the only difference will be the price.
Following on your other comment, you’re certainly right that you can occasionally find a beer that’s just plain bad. I’ve learned to stay away from the “sampler” packs and there are a few of the fairly large microbrewers that I avoid. Not naming names, but there are a couple of California brewers that makes some seriously bad shlock and sell it at premium prices — could be it suffers in the shipping? Can’t say I’ve had a bad IPA brewed in Colorado or Wyoming though, they’ve just become sadly standardized.
Incidentally, my recent sampling frenzy was due to a visit from my sister-in-law from New York City — where everything is bigger and better, just ask her! She’s also an IPA fan so I thought I’d lay in a supply to show her that we’re really not so terribly deprived out here in fly-over country. We tasted all the different IPAs and she was quite disappointed because they were all just like the IPA you get in New York City (shlapp!).

I live in the Richmond area in Virginia and we’ve enjoy a good number of new brewhouses over the past 3 or 4 years for sure. Most turn out a great product and take their work seriously. However there is one that has not risen to the occasion and it was a disappointment to visit his storefront this past year for the first time.

Now I’ve been very hesitant to criticize and I’m not sure why. I think it’s due the ultimate respect I have for the industry. That said, this kid should get (metaphorically speaking) slapped around a bit for turning out such crappy beer. I say it’s crappy because it tastes like some stuff I’ve made and home (and I’m not very good at it to be perfectly honest – though I love to make beer).

I was with a co-worker and fellow beer enthusiast and we were driving home from a conference in Northern Virginia. We decided to stop by and give this new place a go. So just off of exit 110 on I95 we went.

The brewhouse was small and in a small strip mall. Seemed like as good-a place as any for a brewhouse right? So we went in and tried whatever it was we tried. Neither of us were overly impressed. Now my opinion may not matter for squat but when my friend said he didn’t like the beer, I knew it wasn’t just me.

So we finished the first and ordered a 2nd but different styles. Normally after the 1st, everything else just tastes good anyway right? No! Still crappy beer. I think we may have had a 3rd each but I don’t recall.

I agree that there is a down turn in basic overall quality that new breweries are putting out. The onslaught of people joining the industry is creating a lower standard of overall craft beer quality. Which is disheartening that people creating craft beer and have a passion now for the growing industry feel there is nothing wrong with what they are producing. I live in a state that has a brewery opening almost every month. But have no commercial experience. Going from five gallon batches to 15 barrels consistent beer is a whole new world. I have been the ass in the room for some time. Pushing the point that most new breweries have no idea of basic control and brewing practices and I always seek out new breweries. With much disappointment after having a few beers I shrug and leave telling the serve there product is alright. Though most is infected and has major flaws which all come donwn to basic brewing process and control. I push for more interaction and beer advocates to encourage better beer. Not just filling there taps with the next new. You should know your customers. And what they like.

I find it interesting that the theme of the last 4 CBC’s were about quality and about how startups need to be careful. Well, I am the owner of a startup. As I have said I have been to the last 4 conferences and we pay a bunch of money to the BA and to go to these events. The seminars are very general. They point fingers and say “watch it” yet the material the BA puts out is not very helpful. The seminars are not in depth and there seems to be a shortage of desire from the BA to truely address this issue. Aside from naming the Established breweries, or the startups with millions of dollars doing well and say: do what they do. Well if this club really is inclusive then show us the way. I have spent a bunch of money on QC and plan to spend more. My budget is not the same as Sun King or even Elevation. I have a 7bbl system and a 20bbl system and still seem blown away by some of these so called “startups” that have 10 million to throw down on a brand new brewery. So I say to Paul Gatza. Instead of building a huge new office, sink some money into real programs for the members of the BA to improve their products.

well said. They sure seem to be biting at least a few fingers off the hand that feeds them. BTW I have going to GABF since the Merchandise Mart days and I have had quite a few shitty beers there over the years, infected, or diacetyl bombs, or DMS cabbage/creamed corn bombs, or banana-y lagers and pale ales that were NOT Belgian, you name it. Frankly I wonder if they would just as soon the new guys started their own organization. If you make 500-2500 bbls of beer I believe your dues are in the $300 range. 1500 new members in the last two years and 1700 potential members pending, that’s nearly a million dollars in dues alone, you’d think they wouldn’t be so insulting. Maybe somebody should tell Paul Gatza not to “f***it up”

Have you looked into MBAA (Master Brewers Association of America)? When I was considering getting into your business it appeared they had a lot more to offer, in terms of usable, practical technical publications and presentations, and for lower dues and presentation/seminar cost. I believe I learned about it on the pro brewer.com board and I believe they have an active Rocky Mountain chapter. But you probably already know that.

Well said. They don’t need to be so patronizing and insulting to what I figure is a segment representing more a million dollars a year in dues and miscellaneous receipts. Maybe I’m way off, but counting the 1900 breweries in planning and the 2000 or so very new breweries, with brewery-in-planning dues at $195 and assuming the nearly 2000 new and newer breweries are mostly in the 500-2500bbl range, and paying $295 in dues, and all of these are buying publications and at least aspiring to go to GABF and the Craft Brewer’s Conference you just ponied up for, for significantly more dollars….maybe Papazian should suggest to Gatza that he, in Gatza’s own words, “not **** it up.”

You probably already know this but the MBAA (Master Brewer’s Association of America) charges only $150 a year for professional members and has well-priced and technically explicit publications, and has frequent local chapter meetings and on-line presentations, as well as annual conferences. Maybe they might take your money without patronizing you.

To a point, I hear what you’re saying. It’s not in anyone’s interest for Gatza to knock new brewers down a peg, and if dues aren’t being used to promote best practices, good beer, and education, then it feels like wasted money.

The flip side is that I’ve experienced first hand exactly what he’s talking about. The wellspring of new breweries and improved overall quality has marched hand in hand with a lot of good will in the industry. I sense a commonality and brotherhood among a lot of the brewers I’ve spoken with. But that good will masks a lot of blemishes. In a growth industry, substandard product can ride the tide.

I’m an amateur homebrewer with no particular plans to ever sell beer, but I have encountered two separate breweries here in NH that sell swill that even a novice can do better. I won’t name them because I want local breweries to succeed, but they have the feel of enthusiasts who launched a new venture without getting a grip first. In what industry is it a good idea to launch without sufficient resources and expertise? I’m friends with a guy who owns a bottle shop in a southern NH college town. He has expressed frustration on more than one occasion with the unnamed breweries that not only is their product inconsistent, but they fail to even provide steady supply.

It certainly behooves Gatza and the association to promote best practices, but like any industry’s trade group I don’t think it’s their responsibility to unconditionally encourage new breweries. We will reach an equilibrium where the growth of new breweries dies down. That time will see a pretty dramatic culling of brewers whose initial success was not based on good product, but rather on the upwards trend of the industry.

Well said. Restaurants close all the time when their food sucks… but it doesn’t keep people from going out to eat, does it? Paul Gatza and the BA should really start taking themselves a little less seriously.

Well, Stone puts out a fine product; I like its Arrogant B@stard Ale (I
fear that if I put in the full name the typically squeamish Post will
delete it) which reminds me a lot of the Capstone ESB made by Oasis in
Boulder some years ago. The difference is that Stone charges about two
to three times as much for its product as Oasis did. If all the brewers
start to implement this kind of “quality control” I’ll have to go back
to mass-produced stuff. So I’m not so sure I’m enthusiastic about the
comments from Mitch Steele. And I agree with the comment that the craft
brew world is awash in IPAs, which I’m awfully tired of. It would be
more interesting if they just put out a product called “bitter” which
would vary greatly from brewery to brewery, kind of like it used to be
in the UK.

Well, Stone puts out a fine product; I like its Arrogant B@stard Ale (I
fear that if I put in the full name the typically squeamish Post will
delete it) which reminds me a lot of the Capstone ESB made by Oasis in
Boulder some years ago. The difference is that Stone charges about two
to three times as much for its product as Oasis did. If all the brewers
start to implement this kind of “quality control” I’ll have to go back
to mass-produced stuff. So I’m not so sure I’m enthusiastic about the
comments from Mitch Steele. And I agree with the comment that the craft
brew world is awash in IPAs, which I’m awfully tired of. It would be
more interesting if they just put out a product called “bitter” which
would vary greatly from brewery to brewery, kind of like it used to be
in the UK.

I for one applaud Paul for his comments. There are definitely start up breweries who are not doing themselves or the market in general any favors. It takes balls for the BA to tell it like it is. Sure the folks making substandard beer will eventually fail but they do damage to the industry in the meantime. Its important to remember that the big breweries still own the market and they are trying hard to win back market share lost in recent years to craft and micro operators. Unprofessional start up players make their job easier. Paul has been at this a long time. He was around in 1994 when I first entered the industry and he certainly is coming from the right place. Don’t expect the BA to hold your hand every step of the way and fix all your problems. If you want your beer to taste better, you have lots of resources to turn to. If you think your beer is the bomb already, conduct a blind tasting with some experienced beer folks (not just the local bar flies) and find out for real how you stack up. You might be unpleasantly surprised.

Thanks to Eric Gorski and The Denver Post for zeroing in one one of the most important issues in craft brewing. And for those of you small brewers who think you’re being picked on, step back and lighten up. Mr. Gatza is right to worry about quality, just as he is right to worry about all those corporate craft brewing phonies. He gets paid to worry. Austin, where I live, is in the midst of the biggest boom ever in craft brewing. If my 25 years of observing and writing about craft beer are any indication, at least half of the brewers that got cranked up in the past few years will be gone. The market has always done a spectacular job of deciding who stays in business and who does not. No amount of advertising and marketing trickery has ever sidetracked the craft beer industry. And do you know what always decides and always will decide? Quality and creativity.

Brewers that take offense to Paul Gatza’s remarks are most likely the ones that need beer improvement and if you are not a brewer but are still offended you need a reality check. The romantic “Me too” and “Everyone and their F##king brother opening a brewery” phase has started to see its limits. I’m all about it, as it pushes good beer in the right direction, but I know of at least 10 breweries within 100 miles of me that in my humble opinion need work. Some of those are devastatingly bad even after 2-3 years of being open, all of them home brewers that have never step foot (production brewed) in a commercial brewery nor have they had formal brewing education. Now I’m not saying you have to do that to be successful, but you better be gifted, hungry to win and/or wealthy to make it a business and not just a really expensive hobby. As a brewer when I crack open a beer from one of the solid regional breweries I’m instantly reminded of why they have had such success and it sends me right back to my books and practices to continue to improve, and I’ve been in the industry for 8 years now. Its the arrogance of some of these startups that really will be their demise. First and foremost selling beer is a business, a highly competitive, highly regulated and very complicated business. 80% of what I do to stay in business has little to do with my beer quality. Marketing, foresight and vision on new trends, branding, social media, etc.. (the things Craft beer fanatics loath) are all key things that separate the pros from the home-brewers that simply are in over their heads. Brewing a Sixtel of killer IPA that you and your buddies polish off in a week is one thing, but packaging, marketing and distributing that beer, having it stay and taste fresh for months, dealing with distributors, chasing kegs, finding out a bar just put on a keg of your pale that’s a year old…..is quite another. Add to that your one of a couple thousand breweries fighting for the same share. There’s no “please give me break I’m new” section at the store. Both good and bad your gauged against the pros. Not to mention the amount of new breweries having to change branding/naming simply because they didn’t exercise their mouse for a quick Google search proves this point. I’ve dumped batches that I knew sucked, I’ve humbly taken the bad reviews on beers I thought were pretty good and was honest with myself about the fact they actually needed work. Make no mistake when you have bills to pay and banks/inventors looking for returns you’ll justify almost anything to not loose money, I’ve been there. I also look at my cases every time we do a bottling run and think about a person at the store maybe choosing to spend his hard earned money on my beer. I think to myself is this beer worth $40 a case…would I drink this beer over e.g. founders All Day IPA, from an objective quality view, that’s what keeps you honest and journeying to make really good beer. There is so much new, great, opportunity in craft beer, must the same as old proven truths that will weed out those who just simply aren’t ready to earn their share of the beer biz. That’s not a hateful or some grudge driven statement it is just a reality. If everyone is killing it, we all win. Get experience, make sure you can do what your imagination thinks it can do. I wish everyone the best, we all need it.

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